Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Macnamara for bringing this motion forward. This issue always deserves discussion. I have been here for a while—in fact, I was elected in 2007. I heard very similar speeches to that in 2007, before the government of the day decided to relax the immigration procedures. What happened after that is well known: 50,000 unauthorised arrivals and at least 1,200 dead at sea. Being in government is not easy; it requires some resolve and some view to the entire issues, not just succumbing to a feel-good position.

No-one should forget what happened after the undoing of those tougher controls by then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. I've spoken to a number of people. I had a young man approach me in the last 12 months who was in Border Force. He was on the boat that was fishing people out of the sea off of Christmas Island when that terrible tragedy occurred. About two months later he was once again involved in pulling people out of the sea; I think three died that time. He's struggling with his mental health issues, I have to tell you. He said it's a deep and binding scar on him. He has been on Comcare for some time, trying to find a way back into the workforce. I've spoken to other people who worked for defence, and they said it's bad enough pulling bodies out of the water; it's even worse when they are disintegrating. With the policy we have in place, it is seven years since we've seen a successful landing by people into Australia. It's worth saying that in 2013 the enormity of what happened had sunk in, and the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said boat arrivals will never be settled in Australia period.

I know this is a private member's motion. I'm not too sure what Labor Party policy is in that area, but, given the comments of the Leader of the Opposition position in the last week calling for the Murugappans—the Sri Lankan family who came here on a boat and have been through every process imaginable in Australia, as they've been surrounded by human rights lawyers, and at every level have been rejected as being genuine refugees—to be allowed to stay in Australia permanently, you can only presume that the Labor Party has a completely different position to what it had in 2013, and in fact we are in a revisitation of 2007, where it's okay to open the borders up and nothing will happen.

In fact, I even remember going to a church service at the time of the last election—not my local church; a church of my denomination. When the minister saw me walk in—

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In the period when the Baxter detention centre was open, a friend of mine was visiting an asylum seeker. My friend was going overseas, and he said to me, 'Would you go and visit the asylum seeker?' I said, 'Sure.' So I went and visited him. He was a very impressive young Iranian man. There is no doubt in my mind that he would have made a great Australian, but he wasn't a refugee. He did not meet the criteria. Eventually he left, and I believe he settled somewhere else in the world.

The point, as it is with all of these cases, is that the quality of the individual is not relevant to the cases that we make about border control, because every individual should be considered equal. In fact, there are probably five billion people in the world who would like to come to Australia and who would, indeed, make great Australians. But we cannot afford to open our border to five billion new Australians.

The member who moved this motion spoke about those who came to Australia under the medevac bill, which was a bill, once again, that was pushed through the parliament, backed by Labor. It proved to be exactly what we predicted it would. It was a breakthrough for doctors on these islands to sign off and get people into Australia, and then you couldn't shift them because they were surrounded by the phalanx of human rights lawyers that want to destroy our border place controls.

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